After six years (two terms), this week marks the end of my time on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). While I plan to remain involved with open source issues and with the Board, the end of my service on the Board is a significant personal milestone, so I thought that I would briefly reflect on the past six years for open source, and especially the OSI.

The US Federal Government is one of the world's largest buyers of software, much of which is custom developed by government contractors in response to RfP's and sole source procurements. Not only is the original development of this software expensive, but the Government must often negotiate follow-on sole source contracts with the same vendor for support and enhancement. Beyond that, many of these contractors are incapable of building complex systems.

If you had told me three years ago that Microsoft would release software for Linux, I would have been incredulous. But that's already happened. Now Microsoft has announced that they are going to release a version of their SQL Server relational DBMS for Linux next year.

In the first known case of ransomware on MacOS X, KeRanger was inserted into the installer for version 2.90 of the open source project transmissionbt, The transmissionbt team quickly issued fixes, and the new installer for version 2.92 is free of ransomware. I hope that very few people were affected, and that they were able to restore their system from a recent TimeMachine backup. The alternative is sending a bitcoin (worth more than $400US at the moment) to the criminals to get the decryption key.

Open source, open software, open systems. Similar, but far from identical. Of course, the word "open" conveys a meaning that makes "open software trends" quite different from "software trends". The latter covers a vast range of topics, from the offerings of large vendors of proprietary software, such as Microsoft or Oracle, to the emergence and acceptance (or rejection) of various business and technical issues around software definition, design, development, and distribution, not to mention startups and the entire global software industry.

I spent a fair amount of time thinking about "open software trends", the name for this site. Even though I don't think of myself as a "trendy" person, when it comes to software, I'm always trying to figure out what's likely to happen next. Of course, it's extremely rare for new technologies to be quickly and widely adopted. Instead, we see the initial and ongoing reactions and then see it gain (or possibly lose) followers over time. The Mac went up, then down, and is now moving sharply up.

Welcome to Open Software Trends! Some people have said that 2009 will be the year of open source, but many of those people have been saying that for several years now. To me, it's not a sudden event, but rather a constantly growing acceptance and use of open source software. Here are just a few examples:

As of December, 2008, Firefox had more than a 20% share among browser users. Quite impressive, especially considering that Firefox is only preinstalled on Linux desktops and that everyone else has to download and install it themselves.